The Penitent One (Boston Crime Thriller Book 3), Brian Shea [best non fiction books of all time .TXT] 📗

the cigarette hanging from his mouth. He'd been doing this job for a long time and would never contaminate a scene with a cigarette butt, so he put it out before he entered the world of the dead.

He had a cup of coffee in his hand, homemade. His wife's special brew, as he called it. He washed down the taste of the nicotine with the hot, black liquid. Steam came from his mouth as he exhaled, and he huffed his way over to Kelly and Barnes, who were waiting by the tape to greet him.

"Glad you could make it so quickly, Ray."

"I wouldn't miss it for the world." He rolled his eyes. "What have we got?"

This time it was Kelly's turn to summarize the information. It was like a game of telephone, but instead of the story getting more convoluted with each retelling, it became more refined and concise.

After Kelly finished his summation, Charles said, "Let's take the walk."

The three approached in tandem to where the body lay underneath the canopy. The snow shifted to an icy sleet, clattering noisily against the top of the plastic tarp, like the sound of gravel against a windshield.

"Beautiful weather we're having today," Charles said in jest.

The body lay face down, the man’s left arm contorted to the side and his right arm outstretched above his head. His legs were sprawled out, separating in a split.

"Would you look at that?" Charles said.

Kelly and Barnes scanned the snow-covered ground, hoping to see a piece of evidence.

"What do you see, Ray?" Kelly asked.

"It looks like he's making a snow angel." With thirty years of working the dead, the senior crime scene tech’s sarcastic, dark humor found a way to rear its ugly head in the first few minutes of the crime scene.

"Have you been working on that one the whole way here?"

"Pretty much," Ray said, taking a swig of his coffee. "I'm glad you liked it.”

“Let’s get started, shall we?" Barnes asked.

"I just need to grab my gear.” Charles switched to a more serious tone.

"Me too," Kelly said.

The three broke off and headed back to their respective vehicles to gather the items they would need to effectively process the scene.

14

Photos and overalls were completed. The body had been rolled, giving Charles more ammo for his dark humor arsenal. The senior tech commented that rolling the heavyset, middle-aged man was like making the iconic Frosty the Snowman.

The information provided by the street boss, Sergeant Parker, had been accurate up to this point. Three distinct stab wounds. One deep puncture in the lower abdomen, right of the center, just above the hip line. The two entry points in the back were higher up. Charles surmised the wound left of the spinal column had been driven in deep. Conjecture, when at the hands of experience, moved a case forward instead of requiring them to wait for the autopsy report. Charles believed this wound, if deep enough, would have penetrated the chest cavity near the heart and was most likely the killing blow. Kelly saw no indication to the contrary.

The white snow surrounding the corpse was now soaked in the dead man's dark blood. With the close-in scene complete, all photographs and evidence collected, the body was now shrouded by a yellow tarp and awaiting the arrival of the ME’s office to make the removal.

The gray morning light would be breaking soon, and with it, the commuters would begin heading to work. The media vans had arrived, beginning their breaking news broadcasts under the glow of several bright spotlights. Thankfully, the body was obscured from view.

They hadn't located the murder weapon. As luck would have it, the perp had left a trail of blood that arced in the direction of School Street. The gap between each droplet widened as they progressed away from the body, indicating the suspect picked up the pace.

When they first arrived on scene, Kelly noticed a series of footprints in the snow around the body, freshly coated by the falling snow. Casting a footprint was impossible in snow, but by using proper angles and light coupled with a measurement tool for reference, usable photographs could be obtained. One shoe print had remained relatively undisturbed, protected from the sleet by the canopy. Charles captured the image before it was lost to nature. Definitely not boot treads, meaning the print didn’t belong to the responding officers; rather, it was a zigzagged sneaker tread measuring roughly nine inches.

The blood droplets were lined with triangulated orange evidence markers, photographed, and samples were collected. The direction of travel led toward the Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

"We're going to need to get that ATM video footage," Kelly said, staring at a bank’s business front. Adjacent to that was a narrow alleyway that would be the perfect spot for somebody to lie in wait in the darkness.

"I'm already on it," Barnes said. "I put a call in to the bank’s emergency after-hours number. I left a voicemail, so hopefully we’ll get a call back soon. Worst-case scenario, we'll wait until the bank opens and we should be able to access it then."

The receipt sticking out of the ATM had been retrieved.

"Well, we have a pretty damn good timestamp for when this occurred, or at least a close approximate." A transaction for $160 was processed and completed at 2:12 a.m.

No wallet was found on the victim. The detainee, one Charlotte Dupree, who claimed to be the dead man's friend, said his name was Jason Palmer, age forty-eight, of Medford, Massachusetts. When asked why they were in downtown Boston, she said that they were just catching up over a couple of drinks at a bar in Faneuil Hall.

Barnes took the lead on the field interview, quickly breaking the woman down and punching holes in the story. Dupree conceded she and Palmer were having an affair and had met for drinks after a business meeting Palmer had earlier in the day. But during the course of the evening, Palmer had told her that he was ending their